Ways of Life
  • Published: 18 June 2023
  • ISBN: 9781787331907
  • Imprint: Jonathan Cape
  • Format: Hardback
  • Pages: 400
  • RRP: $79.99

Ways of Life

Jim Ede and the Kettle's Yard Artists

Formats & editions
Paperback
18 Oct 2025
Hardback
18 Jun 2023
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This first biography of the Kettle's Yard artists reveals the life of a visionary who helped shape twentieth-century British art and explores a thrilling moment in the history of modernism

This first biography of the Kettle's Yard artists reveals the life of a visionary who helped shape twentieth-century British art and explores a thrilling moment in the history of modernism

'The beautiful, revelatory biography we have been waiting for. I loved it'
EDMUND DE WAAL

'This book is the legacy Jim Ede might have wished for'
OBSERVER

The lives of Jim Ede and the Kettle's Yard artists represent a thrilling tipping point in twentieth-century modernism: a new guard, a new way of making and seeing, and a new way of living with art. The artists Ben and Winifred Nicholson, Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, Alfred Wallis and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska were not a set like the Bloomsbury Set or Ravilious and his friends. But Jim Ede recognised in each of the artists he championed something common and kindred, some quality of light and life and line.

Jim Ede is the figure who unites them. His vision continues to influence the way we understand art and modern living. He was a man of extraordinary energies: a collector, dealer, fixer, critic and, above all, friend to artists. For Ede, works of art were friends and art could be found wherever you looked - in a pebble, feather or seedhead. Art lived and a life without art, beauty, friendship and creativity was a life not worth living. Art was not for galleries alone and it certainly wasn't only for the rich. At Kettle's Yard in Cambridge, he opened his home and his collection to all comers. He showed generations of visitors that learning to look could be a whole new way of life.
  • Published: 18 June 2023
  • ISBN: 9781787331907
  • Imprint: Jonathan Cape
  • Format: Hardback
  • Pages: 400
  • RRP: $79.99
Categories:

About the author

Laura Freeman

Laura Freeman was shortlisted for the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award 2018 for her first book, The Reading Cure. She has written for publications including Spectator, The Times, Sunday Times, Daily Mail, Daily Telegraph, TLS and Evening Standard, and was shortlisted for Features Writer of the Year at the 2014 British Press Awards.

Praise for Ways of Life

Ways of Life is a portable Kettle's Yard, an entrancing book of immense and curious beauty

Ruth Scurr, author of Fatal Purity

The beautiful, revelatory biography of Jim Ede and Kettle's Yard that we have been waiting for. I loved it

Edmund de Waal

Over the many years that I've been visiting Kettle's Yard, it's as if the place has become a dear friend; now with this beautifully constructed book I am able to meet the man whose presence and artistic acuity can be seen in every room and in every careful juxtaposition of images. Wonderful!

Julia Blackburn, author of Dreaming the Karoo

An extraordinary tale and could not have been told better or with more sensitivity. Her book will make anyone want to pay an immediate visit

Literary Review

An excellent biography of Jim Ede. Reading Laura Freeman's luminous study of the curator and collector, I can't help but picture the gallery and house he built - the haven of Kettle's Yard in Cambridge

Daily Telegraph

Meticulously researched, sympathetically told, the book is infused with the spirit of Kettle's Yard

i

Laura Freeman has more than done her subject justice. It is a complicated story, lucidly told and neatly illustrated

Spectator

A cabinet of curiosities... It tells the story of a life and a century

London Review of Books

Freeman's attention falls on each particular of Ede's life and turns it over like a polished pebble in a jacket pocket. Along with his gallery, this book is the legacy he might have wished for

Observer

Freeman has done a wonderful job here in conveying with absolute precision why Ede mattered and what made him different from his Bloomsbury contemporaries

Sunday Times

A thorough and entertaining biography... Excellently paced

The Times

Freeman brings characters vividly to life on the page, recreating the lively circle that joined in Ede's many activities with sympathy and panache... Ways of Life conjures his spirit and continues his mission in style

Tablet

A deeply researched book

Oldie

A triumph... It's exactly the right tone of thoughtful, critical affection... The witty sentences are fine things, illuminating and illumined, conveying the way light is bounced around Kettle's Yard as it shines from candlesticks and picture frames

Prospect

An impassioned biography

The Times, *Top 50 Non-Fiction Books*

Addictive from the get-go... Freeman is a deft storyteller

Homes & Antiques

A captivating biography

House & Garden

If ever the spirit of a gallery is captured within hard covers, it is Kettle's Yard, Cambridge, in this beautiful, original biography of its founder... Freeman's writing has Ede's flair, grace and insight

Financial Times, *Best Books of 2023*

Gorgeously written

The Times, *Books of the Year*

Highly original… Admirers of that secular sanctuary will adore this book

Critic, *Books of the Year*

Beautifully written... A book I have always hoped someone would write.

Nigel Slater
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